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Saturday, September 21, 2013

LinkedIn Accused of Hacking Users’ Email Accounts.

Customers of the professional networking site LinkedIn have sued the
company in a California federal court accusing it of hacking into their
email accounts.

In a complaint filed yesterday (and which you can read in full below)
the users accuse the company of essentially impersonating its users for
the purpose of obtaining access to their email contacts. “If a LinkedIn
user leaves an external email account open, LinkedIn pretends to be
that user and downloads the email addresses contained anywhere in that
account to Linkedln’s servers,” the complaint reads. “Linkedln is able
to download these addresses without requesting the password for the
external email accounts or obtaining users’ consent.”

Once it has the addresses, the plaintiffs say LinkedIn sends what
they describe as “endorsement emails” for various products and services.
“These endorsement emails contain the name and likeness of those
existing users from whom Linkedln surreptitiously obtained the list of
email addresses,” the complaint says.
The plaintiffs say its all part of a marketing strategy that’s
overtly described in LinkedIn’s regulatory filings with the US
Securities and Exchange Commission saying it intends to “pursue
initiatives that promote the viral growth of our member base.”

I asked LinkedIN for a response, and didn’t get one right away, and
will update the post when I get one. (It is Saturday after all.) However
the company has denied the allegations and called them “without merit,”
in comments to Bloomberg and The Los Angeles Times.